


Blind Man's Bluff

by Skiewrites



Series: Bang Work [5]
Category: Grishaverse - Fandom, Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Grishaverse Big Bang 2019
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22038790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skiewrites/pseuds/Skiewrites
Summary: Inej has been followed by shades her whole life, with some days having been worse than others. When Kaz goes missing with no warning, however, she knows that the worst has yet to come.
Series: Bang Work [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1174253
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25
Collections: Grishaverse Big Bang 2019





	Blind Man's Bluff

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the Grishaverse Big Bang, and you can find more fics on this collection and their tumblr page [ here](https://skiewrites.tumblr.com/). My team for this fic can all be found [here](https://grishaversebigbang.tumblr.com/post/188802368464/project-info-gang-name-gay-ghosties-title-blind) and they are all so very awesome and I can’t thank them enough for all the help and content that they’ve created for this project. Please please please go check them all out! This could project could not have been done without them.

Part One:

The air had been thick, hot, and full of the scent of death. It was one of the only things that Inej remembered from her dream.

There were a few smaller details that she remembered, but not many. Despite the lack of smell, since no one could smell in their dreams, there was a memory of burning wood etched into her brain, something that she had not smelled since the winter that had long passed.

And then there was the scream.

It was horrible to listen to, for it was not the cry of the dying praying to their god, nor was it the wailing of the dead, begging to live once more. No, it was the shriek of the mourning, of one who is facing pain they never expected to face, and the sudden confrontation of it has left them disorientated, hurt, and lost in their own emotions.

The silence of her own home when she awoke was startling after listening to it, to say the least.

Inej tried to throw the dream out of her mind as she started to get ready for the day ahead, trying not to compare how cold the air seemed to be against the heat in her dream, and how the silence seemed to echo now that she could no longer hear the screaming in her mind.

Breakfast, get dressed, brushed her teeth, her hair, and then she was out of the door, locking it behind her and continuing on for school. The summer break was only a week away now, meaning that less and less learning was being done each day as more and more kids got distracted with the promise of summer just ahead of them.

It was quite a walk. Inej lived in a woodland area almost half an hour outside the edge of town, and from there it took another fifteen minutes to get to the school. Not that she would wish for anything else; the freedom of living by herself so far from town well outweighed the pain of always having to walk over an hour and a half just to get an education.

Nina always thought she was crazy for it; always told her that she had a spare room in her house that Inej could always have if she found walking to be too tiring and always told Inej to at least get a car, to which she always said no. Walking was fine for her. Kaz never shared his opinion on Inej’s daily walking. He never seemed to share his opinions on anything if he could afford it, but she always noticed his lingering looks when she left and started her walk back home, and the subtle look of relief as he looked away from her every morning.

But today was slightly different, for more reasons than just the weird dream that she could still remember.

Her walk to school started off like normal. Out the door, lock the door, double check the lock, then out of the garden, making sure to close the gate behind her. It was then a walk toward the main road, on a small dirt path that was beaten by the people who lived in the woods before her, though she never met the occupants of the house previous to her father buying the modest estate. The paths would weave between the trees and the undergrowth, the branches and the leaves waving and dancing around her as she made her way to school, but the only sound for seemingly miles was the sound of her own feet stepping on small stones, fallen twigs and the misplaced leaf.

“Help me!”

Inej stopped at the noise. The dancers continued with their sequence; nothing could interrupt or stop them from their job, even if there was now no noise to move to. Looking around, Inej took in every looming tree and every shadow, looking for something that was never there before.

She carried on when nothing greeted her.

“Help me! Please!”

Turning around, Inej came face to face with a shade. It was hard to make it out in the daylight; the sun’s rays being strong enough to break through the shade’s body. He looked oddly familiar, but she had never seen him before, not as a living nor as a shade.

“Leave,” she demanded. The shade looked like he was about to cry, looking to the side of the path, before looking back to Inej.

“Please. Help,” he begged. 

Inej merely sighed. She hated shades. She hated the way that they demanded and expected her to carry out their wishes and will since she was one of the only people in the world who could even see them. No. She could not do what they wanted; some of their wishes were too out of reach for even a living person. No. They all had to move on, before they began to hurt themselves, or, worse, other people.

“Move on. Leave.” She said to him, before turning her back on the boy and moving on, walking down the beaten track and towards school. The shade tried to stop her by moving in front of her, trying to make her stop and listen to what it had to say. Inej ignored it and continued walking, moving straight through the shade.

“Please.”

Inej did not turn back to it, and pushed out of her mind as she continued on her way.

Thirty-five minutes later, she was walking into the school building, taking note that it was seemingly different here, too; silent and without the normal whispering. There were the stares too, something she only got when she had moved to the school and when Kaz went through with a daring plan and came through on top.

Inej started to wonder what Kaz had done, until she realised what the problem was.

* * *

Part Two:

Kaz’s disappearance was merely the start of everything being simply  _ wrong. _

Nina was silent during their first class, not even meeting her eye during the lesson, making her realise how often they would share secret but knowing looks between themselves, and a sudden wave of mourning overcome her before she pushed it away and looked down at her empty page. Nina didn’t look at her and silently talk to her during one of their only shared classes.

Inej frowned and looked down at her lap where her phone lay. There were several unread messages from several people, people that she knew through Kaz and therefore people she was currently avoiding until Kaz’s absence was explained to her; until she had answers to the questions that they had for her.

Instead, she sent Nina a text: ‘are you ok?’.

The next class, history, would usually be shared with Kaz, the pair of them sitting next to each other in the back right hand corner of the classroom, the desk next to the door, but his absence was widely noticed when everyone would sneak a peak themselves at her and the empty seat next to her, showing off his absence, just to double check that he was missing. 

“Are you ignoring me?” Inej asked as she sat across to Nina in the cafeteria next, who looked up in surprise, only to look back down at her food again, pushing it around her tray instead of demolishing it like she normally would.

“No, what makes you say that?”

“You didn’t respond to my text,” Inej said, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice.

“Oh. I had to get a new phone.”

“A new phone?”

“Yeah, my last one broke.”

“What happened to it?” Inej asked, feeling rather uncomfortable in that moment. While Kaz liked to use her for her uncanny ability to pick up information from almost any source, she felt weird having to almost interrogate Nina for information, especially since Nina was normally forthcoming with information, and was actually one of her main sources of information when it came to the latest gossip from girls in their school.

“There was this fire, and I dropped it trying to escape. I wasn’t eager to go back for it.”

_ The fire started with a mourning scream. _

_ The air was filled with smoke, the toxic gas leaking into every nook and cranny of the forest it could find, leaving no stone in place and no leaf unturned in its quest to poison every living thing in the otherwise peaceful woods. Everything ran from the bright red flames, unnatural in colour and in action, the sound of pounding feet on the otherwise icy ground being dimmed out by the roaring flames that not only hunted everything that resided in the forest, dead or alive, but also promise to hide the secret of what caused it. _

_ It ended with silence. _

“Oh, okay. What’s your new number?” Inej asked, and obediently typed in the number that Nina recited almost boredly into her phone, only for the contact ‘Nina (new)’ to pop up on her phone, as if it had already been there the whole time.

Clicking on the contact, Inej tried to find out when it had been put in, but the date was blank.

How strange.

Inej was about to point it out to Nina and make a joke about being haunted again, something that they used to do a lot when shades tormented her, but when she turned around, she found that Nina was already distracted again, looking across the canteen at a guy who Inej didn’t recognize.

“Who’s that?”

“Who?”

“That?” Inej gestured the guy that Nina had been staring at, only for Nina to spare a quick look before turning away, back at her phone, pretending that she was looking at something very important, though they could both see that the phone was not even on, having turned off during Nina’s staring.

“Oh,” Nina said as she pointedly made sure that she didn’t turn towards the guy, who was now playing for his food at the counter. The silence dragged on for close for three minutes before Nina spoke again. “It’s no one, Inej.”

“No one?” Inej teased as she watched the guy sit down at a table by himself, his back facing Nina’s back.

“No one that you need to involve yourself or Brekker with,” Nina said as she stood and cleared her tray, her food half eaten for once, and left the cafeteria.

She still had half an hour of her lunch period left.

Inej frowned, before quickly taking a picture of the guy eating his lunch in front of her before looking back down at her phone. It was hard to make the guy out, and it would be harder still to identify him from the back of his head, but if Kaz himself couldn’t recognize him, he’d be able to find someone who did.

Her phone dinged when she sent the image to his phone along with a question mark.

It dinged again a minute later, and she frowned at the notification.

‘ERROR 307: MESSAGE UNABLE TO SEND.’

* * *

Part Three:

When the final bells rang for the day, Inej was the first out of their seat to face the sea of teenagers that were eager to leave school. Normally she liked to hide in the classroom until the crowd was gone and she could peacefully meet Kaz outside the classroom and walk with him as they talked, but today was not one of those days. Kaz was missing, people kept asking her where he was, and she had a lot of looking to do before she was able to give any of them any sort of questions.

But if she was quick to leave the classroom, then Nina had super speed, running out of the room like her life depended on it. This in itself was not strange, she did usually have her extracurricular class to go to, but Inej knew for a fact that she had debating that day and Inej had just watched her run in the opposite direction.

And as much as she was curious as to what Nina was up to, as much she had the burning curiosity to go after her friend, she needed to get out of this forsaken school, because if one more person asked if she knew where Kaz was she was going to pull out her knife and tell them where she was going to shove it in greuling details.

She was just about to leave the school grounds before an arm reached out from an alcove and pulled her out of the crowd.

“Inej! Oh, I’m so glad that I bumped into you!” Jesper smiled at her. 

“If you’re going to ask about Kaz, the answer is no, I don’t know where he is, and no, I don’t know if he’s going to be in tomorrow,” Inej stated, holding the strap of her bag tighter as she shrugged off his arm. The sudden touch had been enough to freak her out for a second until she saw who it was. Jesper had been one of the many people that Kaz introduced to her, and he was one of the better people that Kaz knew.

“Oh,” Jesper replied. “I would have thought that you would know because you guys are like…” And then he muttered something, but it was clearly meant to be said quietly as she couldn’t hear his words over the crowd of students that were rushing to be leaving the school.

“Because we’re like what?” It was clear what Jesper was trying to suggest from the context of his words and the way that he shifted from one foot to the other under her stare.

“Oh, y’know…” His words fell underneath the shouting again, but the crowd was quickly diminishing, and it was clear that he was avoiding the words that everyone thought about Kaz and Inej but were never brave enough to come out and ask them about their relationship.

“No, I don’t,” she did, but it was always funny to watch.

“C’mon! You know exactly what I’m talking about.” 

He was right. She knew that he knew that she knew exactly what he was talking about. It was in fact one of the biggest rumours of the school, and Inej made sure to know every single one of those secrets and rumours. “No, I don’t.” 

“Fucking! You guys are, like, together, like a couple and having sex and stuff.” By this point the corridor was almost empty, meaning that the odd teacher that was walking past noticed the swear and turned their heads to give them a deathly glare at the crass language before moving on, they too wanting to leave the building as fast as the students.

“Contrary to popular belief, we’re not together. We’re not friends with benefits. We’re not secretly dating to hide it from the gossip circles.” 

“Wait, really? But I thought-”

“And that’s the cause of your problem: you thought,” Inej joked. 

Once Jesper got it he let out: “Though, I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

“No,” she replied with a sigh, and Jesper let out a hum of agreement.

She let Jesper walk on out of the school before doubling back towards the small woodlands that made up the barrier of the field of the school. While it was nothing like the woodlands that she lived in, the strong smell of drugs being a huge indicator of that, it was also home to a shade. This one was more than happy to talk to her and give her the more gory details of everything. Inej only knew it as Heleen, and even then referring it to its dead name was grey territory. It was always a bad idea to get attached to the shades left behind, as it kept them on the plane of the living for longer than they needed to be there. And naming something was always the first step of attachment.

“Have you seen Kaz?” She asked, and she instantly regretted her choice to talk to this particular shade. While all the shades that she had met in her life were a pain to deal with, she had never met one as annoying and disgusting as the one in front of her. Every time she met it she felt the need to go home and have a shower, only to scrub her skin red to rid her of the feeling that the shade gave her every time she had to talk to her.

“You mean your boy toy?” the shade asked as it got closer. The setting sun made it harder to notice it but the sudden breath of cold air surrounding Inej was enough to tell her where the shade was.

“He’s not a boy toy,” she muttered just as a cloud went over the sun, making the shade, which was smiling coyly, more visible in front of her. 

“But he is yours then?” it asked as it admired its nails, despite being a shade and therefore not being able to change anything about how it looked.

“I never said that,” Inej replied hotly, the sudden harsh words from someone usually quiet were enough to make the shade take a step back in surprise, before it let out a small chuckle.

“You didn’t need to honey-bun. It’s written all over your pretty face,” it replied as it put a hand in its long wavy hair. “But to answer your question, he hasn’t been seen snooping around since last Friday, which is nice for once. Here I was thinking I was going to have to wait until he graduated to get rid of him.”

Inej rolled her eyes at the insult, but nonetheless her words made her think. Heleen was rather chatty for a shade, most being limited to about twenty words, or five like the shade stuck in the forest. However, shades tended to carry on their most prominent trait from the time that they were alive, and, unfortunately for Inej, Heleen’s was her love for gossip and listening to her own voice. While this did make it very useful for gathering information that would otherwise be hard, Heleen tended to be very biased towards certain subjects, and for some reason she had a very close eye on Kaz. 

This may be the only time that her obsession with him would be useful to her. 

“What about the hospital?” Inej asked. While it would be very unlike Kaz to be in the hospital, as he despised the things and refused to visit, even when the information it help was close to invaluable, often sending her by her self or giving her Jesper for the trip, she couldn’t push that possibility out of the window straight away without checking it out first. After all, someone may have found him first and sent him there despite all the fighting he must have been putting up. 

“Ha, I imagine that he’d rather be dead than go within a block of the building. I have been told that he left his house in the middle of the night on Saturday and hasn’t been back since!” she laughed, the giggling causing a shiver to go through Inej’s spine. She could only imagine how terrifying that giggling could have been when the shade had been alive and your life rested in her hands.

“Okay,” Inej replied, before thanking the shade and turning around to leave. It didn’t surprise her that she didn’t get much help from the shade. They were the least helpful things she had ever had the displeasure of meeting. 

“Before you go–” When Inej turned around to look at the shade, it looked almost scared of what it was about to say next. “–there’s something in those woods where you live. It’s probably something to do with the coming summer solstice, but keep an eye out.” It was the closest to concern that she had ever gotten out of the beings that she had been able to see all of her life, so she nodded and went on her way.

There was something in the woods, and she was getting the impression that it had to do with the shade she had seen earlier that morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Don't forget to check out my other work for the Grishaverse Big Bang here and to check me out on tumblr here as well as everyone else who work on this fic here. 
> 
> Don't forget to give kudos and comments! They really do help with my moral for this work!!!


End file.
